President Donald Trump's decision to attend the NATO summit in Ankara marks a striking rehabilitation of a relationship Washington spent years punishing — and signals that Turkey's geographic and military assets now outweigh its long list of alliance grievances. Trump told reporters on June 24 that he was attending specifically because of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, calling him "a friend" and "a respected leader," with White House spokesperson Anna Kelly confirming the two leaders would hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines.
From Pariah to Pivot: Turkey's Reversal of Fortune
The warmth is a sharp reversal from just a few years ago. After Turkey took delivery of Russia's S-400 air defense system in 2019, Washington expelled it from the multinational F-35 fighter program and, the following year, imposed sanctions on Turkey's defense procurement agency. Many of those disputes remain formally unresolved. Yet Turkey now fields NATO's second-largest military after the United States, controls the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, and shares borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran — facts that have become harder for the alliance to discount as NATO refocuses on collective defense against Russia.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey, who also served as Trump's special representative for Syria during his first term, argued Turkey is "essential to maintaining the U.S. perimeter around Eurasia." Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Can Kasapoğlu framed it more bluntly: with NATO reverting to its Cold War posture after years of counterterrorism focus, nations bringing hard military capability will get preferential treatment.
The Ukraine and Syria Dividends
Turkey's value to the alliance isn't purely geographic. Jeffrey credited Ankara's enforcement of the 1936 Montreux Convention with preventing additional Russian naval reinforcements from entering the Black Sea, and pointed to Turkey's early supply of Bayraktar drones to Kyiv as material to Ukraine's ability to stay in the fight. On Syria, Jeffrey argued Turkey played a central role in backing the opposition that toppled Bashar al-Assad's regime, dealing a significant blow to both Iran and Russia simultaneously.
Congressional Friction Over the $700 Million Arms Sale
Turkey's rehabilitation has limits — chiefly on Capitol Hill. The Trump administration is facing pushback over a proposed $700 million sale of F110 fighter engines to Ankara. Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accused the State Department of failing to adequately justify the decision or address the S-400 question. Jeffrey distinguished the engine sale from full F-35 restoration, arguing the latter carries a technical — not merely political — problem: operating the Russian system alongside America's most advanced stealth aircraft risks exposing sensitive U.S. technology.
Critics, including Sinan Ciddi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, also noted that Turkey is the only NATO member to have applied for membership in both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, and that Erdoğan has openly defended Hamas while seeking expanded access to U.S. defense technology. Those contradictions, Ciddi argued, make deeper defense integration genuinely complicated regardless of the personal rapport between the two heads of state.